After being fired at on their passage in front of fort Orange, because they would not hoist their flag, they were thrown by a storm upon the coast. On the following day they were reconnoitred by some Dutch soldiers. There was at first some slight difficulty as to their admission to the Dutch territory; but that being soon settled, they found themselves the objects of the most generous hospitality.--(_Journal of the Adjutant-General Ramel._)
According to Delarue, the convicts enjoyed great liberty at Sinnamary: they could go about, so long as they kept within certain limits; they had guns and ammunition, and could shoot. The post of Sinnamary, guarded by a few soldiers, had no resemblance whatever to a fort; it was only a poor village, inhabited by Indian or Creole fishermen; and the boat they used for their escape belonged to a German, whom they knew to be engaged in smuggling between Surinam and Cayenne. It was thought that such a state of things did not guarantee much for the security of the convicts, and it was decided to transport them to a much less healthy part of Guiana. By the advice of Tilly, who could not accompany them, as he was being transferred to Cayenne, and with the certainty of the help of Barrick, his pilot, they determined to escape. They quietly went one night with their firearms to a wood, where Barrick awaited them, without all the attending circumstances of revelling Ramel speaks of. They had no sentinel to disarm, but only to give help to a negro, who was trying to master a turtle. The boat contained provisions--scanty, it is true, but still more than sufficient to last them till their arrival in the Dutch possessions. So they did not suffer a week from hunger, as Ramel says: they heard no cannon fired, to signal their departure; in short, they escaped without most of those episodes with which Ramel has thought proper to embellish his recital.
In the year 1807 the Baron de Richemont, a French colonel, was taken by an English privateer in the ship bringing him from the Mauritius to Europe. The town of Chesterfield was assigned to him for a residence. Richemont had been in England about eighteen months, and every proposal of exchange had been refused, when one morning he saw something in his newspaper which made a deep impression on his mind. “I had just been reading,” he says in his memoirs, “an account of Colonel Crawford who had escaped from Verdun, where he was a prisoner on parole, and who, not being willing to take the command of his regiment, until his conduct had been approved of, had appealed to a jury. The jury had declared, that he being detained prisoner against the law of nations, had acted rightly in breaking through the obligation imposed on him. This narrative interested me very much, and I read it several times over with deep attention. I found all the details of the escape plainly set forth, with an account of the ruse to which he had recourse to ensure without fail the success of his plan. He had petitioned the French Government for permission to drink the waters of Spa, promising to return and deliver himself prisoner again at Verdun, and he had taken advantage of this favour, granted with the confidence always inspired by the word of a gentleman, to return to England.